Medical Spanish, made by Batoul Apps, and available in the App Store for $6.99, just added audio to their top 25 medical app. As you can tell by the title, we’re definitely excited about the 2.0 version of this medical app. Some of the new features include audio for over 3,000 phrases, interactive bookmarking, a slightly different interface, and some new content. Did we mention there are over 3,000 phrases with audio now?

We reviewed Medical Spanish back in June and were definitely fans back then. The app even made our top 7 Medical apps list, coming in at #6. We’ll start the review by summarizing our last review, and then talking about the new features.

In our previous review, here is what we liked:

Search function allows you to easily find thousands of key medical phrases / words instantaneously. By far the best feature of the App.

The pharmacy section is great for giving instructions on how to take medications (dosage, timing, etc)

You can use this app even if you can’t speak a single spanish word.

Made by healthcare providers, so questions are on par.

Thousands of phrases can help you with a full H&P and chief complaint.

Can help you save time while you are waiting on the translator.

In our previous review, here are the things we didn’t like so much, and improvements we hoped for:

A favorites section. It would be nice to have a favorites section where you could put the most frequently used spanish phrases.

An option to where the application opens up to the search menu. I find myself using the search option 90% of the time.

Hispanic patients tend to use more nontraditional medications, it would be helpful to have a section dedicated to some of the nontraditional med/treatments used by them.

The developers have announced they will be adding audio to this app as well, which would be amazing.

The developers added 3 out of the 4 things we wanted to see in their new version of the app. They’ve added audio, bookmarks, and a section on commonly used medicinal herbs and plants by the Hispanic population.

Having a medical Spanish app with audio is nothing new. There is another medical app, called Emergency Medical Spanish Guide (EMSG) with this feature already. We tried out this app but were not fans because it lacked one of the most basic functions, a search feature. They also only have a couple hundred audio phrases. A search function is critical in a medical Spanish app because you don’t always have the time to go through every section to find out exactly what you’re looking for. Needless to say, with Medical Spanish adding audio, the EMSG app is nowhere close to the level of the updated version of Medical Spanish.

Audio feature and bookmarking:

To access the audio, you tap on a phrase, then a new section appears within the same page, with a play button and a star representing the bookmarks button. (Refer to the pictures). Once you tap the play button, you can stop the audio at any point in the phrase. This is all simple, fast, and fantastically done.

Issues and Improvements we’d like to see in the future:

Overall, we like the user interface, but we have some gripes with the organization of this app. The app opens up with a Review of Systems page, and lists the different systems. You have to scroll down to see other key sections, such as directions, and vocab. Also, the new medicinal herbs section is hard to find. You have to go to the vocabs section and then scroll down to medical plants. This section is crucial because almost all of us have encountered some Hispanic patients who use home remedies they get from local markets. The developers did a nice job of adding bookmarks for separate phrases, but why not add bookmarks for actual sections of the app? We’d like to be able to bookmark sections such as diagnostic tests and medicinal plans. It would also be nice to search for these sections of the app as well, instead of just specific phrases.

With it’s collection of extensive medical phrases and audio, we’d love to see this app have the ability to be a medical Spanish teaching app for healthcare providers. The developers could make a teaching mode, where they would add English audio along with the Spanish audio translations. Can you imagine making a customized playlist using the bookmarks section, then playing it on your way to work? In this manner you could memorize all of the Spanish physical exam instructions, along with anything else of your choosing.

Who this app would be great for:

Every healthcare provider who deals with a large Spanish speaking population.

Conclusion:

Our title of this review explains it all, we’re smitten with this Medical Spanish app. The developers took all the suggestions we made in our previous review and basically nailed them. With the addition of extensive audio, this is a definite must have application for healthcare providers who deal with large Hispanic populations. Unlike other medical Spanish audio apps who have only a few hundred audio phrases, this application has over 3,000. Even if you speak Spanish this could be useful for finding those key medical phrases you might not know. The user interface is quick, stable, and easy to use. The sky is the limit for this medical application and in the future we’d love to see a teaching function added. Oh, and is this app worth the $6.99 asking price? Most definitely.

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Author:

Iltifat Husain, MD

Founder, Editor-in-Chief of iMedicalApps.com. Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Mobile App curriculum at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Thank you for reviewing our app, we definitely have some improvements for search planned in the future, such as going directly to the phrase’s section and searching for sections themselves. We would also add being able to go directly to a phrase’s section from the bookmarks page as well, effectively allowing you to bookmark a section.

We are very proud to offer both search and bookmarking in Medical Spanish as they are crucial for any informational resource and we hope to continue to expand on those features in future updates to make them even better.

iMedicalApps is an independent online medical publication for medical professionals, patients, and analysts interested in mobile medical technology and health care apps. Our physician editors lead a team of physicians, allied health professionals, medical trainees, and mHealth analysts in providing reviews, research, and commentary of mobile medical technology. Our publication is heavily based on our own experiences in the hospital and clinic setting.